Engineering Manager and Evangelist

Manual Data Binding in Flex

I’m currently working on an Exchange calendaring client for AIR (more details to come), and I decided early on to use the Cairngorm Flex framework. I’d worked on Cairngorm projects in the past, but I hadn’t ever used Cairngorm in one of my own projects from start to finish. I decided it was time to put it to use, and to make sure it was 100% AIR friendly.

One of the first things you realize about Cairngorm is that it relies very heavily on data binding. Data binding is one of my favorite features of Flex, so I was very happy with how my application was coming together. But then I ran into a snag. I found myself needing to execute a block of code in response to a property change rather than just display the new property value, or update a component’s data provider. Fortunately, Flex has anticipated this issue, and allows you to set up binding manually in a very flexible (naturally) way.

So here’s the scenario:

I have a ControlBar component which has a busy, and a notBusy state. In the busy state, I show a progress bar, and in the notBusy state, the progress bar goes away, and in its place, I show the date and time of the last update. My ModelLocator has a busy property which makes it easy for me to to maintain a global "busy" state for my entire app. Whenever that properly changes, I want to change the state of the ControlBar component, as well as execute a small block of UI-related code.

The key to making this work is the mx.binding.utils.ChangeWatcher class. In the creationComplete handler of my component, I have the following code:

Believe it or not, that’s it. In my onBusyChange function, I change the state of my component, and do a couple of other small UI-related things. Now whenever the busy property of the ModelLocator changes, my app just does the right thing.

I found that the ChangeWatcher was really the key to making Cairngorm flexible enough to build any type of application. It allowed my team to throw together a pretty nice little Exchange Calendar viewer and notifier which I think will be a big hit with those who use Exchange in a corporate environment, but who aren’t big fans of Outlook. I will release the application and the code with the next public release of AIR.